Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

Time passed slowly and my moustache inched forth so languidly that I sometimes feared that it was losing its sense of purpose in life – but there came a day when certain tubes were uncoupled from undignified bits of the Mortdecai chassis and I was told that I might navigate to the lav under my own steam. As I tottered thither in an imperious dressing-gown I could not but notice an uncommon number of junior nurses loitering in the corridor and, it seemed to me, suppressing maidenly titters. A few minutes later I realised why.

Whimpering, I was helped back to bed while squadrons of ward-maids, helpless with happy laughter, moved into the lav with mops and buckets. Later – much later – I felt proud to have brought a little sunshine into the drab lives of those underpaid little angels of mercy; but for the time being I sulked.

Soon, though, all wounds were healed and I received my Honourable Discharge from the very Matron herself; she said, pronouncing the capital letters sonorously, that I had made a Splendid Recovery and that she heard On All Sides that I had been a Good Patient. She also hoped that I had Learnt my Lesson and would not, in future, come into contact with Damp Grass, which she assured me was the ætiology of the common or garden haemorrhoid. I started to explain that, if she was right, then the piles would have manifested themselves on my knees and elbows, but she gave me an Odd Look. I suspected that she was just hanging about in the hope of a handsome tip but I’m sure you can’t tip Matrons less than a tenner, and in any case I knew that she probably owned shares in the lazar-houses and would get her slice from the dripping roast as soon as I had paid my bill, so I stayed my generous hand.

Jock had a swansdown cushion waiting for me in the Rolls – he had a wonderful grasp of the fundamental necessities of life, bless him.

Back at the Mortdecai half-mansion in the North of the Island – sorry, I thought you knew I lived in Jersey, Channel Islands – I was convalescing splendidly, mounted on cushionry of the finest and downiest, kneading Pomade Hongroise into the fruiting vineyard of my upper lip and applying a little Cognac internally, when the door flew open and a radiant Johanna (to wit, my wife) burst into the room and sprang rapturously into my arms, uttering many a glad cry – only to recoil instantly, giving bent to one of those shrieks which only the gently-nurtured can command and then only when they find their mouths full of well-pomaded moustache. I have never quite known what the word ‘eldritch’ means but there is no reasonable doubt in my mind that eldritch is what that shriek was. No Sabine woman would have got into the quarter-finals that afternoon.

There followed what I can only call an Ugly Scene. She began temperately enough by saying that the Surgeon General of the USA had specifically warned the public against such defilements and that he could call on the support of most of the sterner prophets in the Old Testament. I put it to her logically that whereas I had freely given her my heart, soul, other assorted organs and all my worldly goods, I had never put anything in writing about my upper lip, had I? This reasonable argument did not sway her at all – women use a different logic from men, you must have noticed that – and she redoubled her Jeremiad, calling my lip-valance a social disease and drawing impassioned parallels with the Watergate cover-up.

Thinking to silence her into melting, wifely submission I swept her masterfully into my arms. This time it was my turn to recoil with the eldritch shriek as she smartened me up with a gently-nurtured knee in the groin. ‘Don’t you dare to point that thing at me,’ she snarled and, ‘If I ever wish to munch half-grown brambles I shall go and graze in Potter’s Field,’ and again, ‘Go mingle with the pimps in the Place Pigalle, your face looks like a dirty postcard,’ and, ‘You look as though you were going down on an alley-cat.’ Soon afterwards, bitter words were being exchanged. Finally she clicked open the diamond-studded cover of her Patek Philippe watch and said coldly, ‘As of this moment you have precisely five minutes in which to shave yourself back into the ecology.’

I was not going to take that sort of thing from any mere sex-object, least of all the wife of my personal bosom; I folded my arms lordlily and favoured the ceiling with a stony stare. She rang the bell for Jock, who had cowered out of the room at the very onset of the storm.

‘Jock,’ she said in a kindly voice, ‘is the lock on my bedroom door oiled; does the key turn freely? Good. Oh, and will you tell the maid to make up Mr Mortdecai’s bed in his dressing-room, please. And I shan’t be down to dinner tonight, I’ll just have something on a tray in my bedroom. Thank you, Jock.’

‘Oh really, Johanna, now look here …’ I began.

‘I prefer not to look there, thank you. I have already had a hard day. I shall take some light reading to bed with me. Like the airline timetable.’

It was the cook’s night off – it almost always is these days, isn’t it? – so when I strolled into the kitchen for a reconnaissance, it was Jock who was setting a tray-load of delicious dinner for Johanna: a nice, thick little filet mignon with sauté mushrooms, grilled and stuffed tomatoes and all ringed about with pommes duchesse such as I never tire of and side-dishes of mangetout peas and Jerusalem artichokes. I rubbed my hands: earth hath not anything to show more fair. ‘Give madam lots of those carminative artichokes, Jock,’ I urged. ‘They’ll do her a power of good.’ He shot me a strange look from his glass eye.

When he returned from the grocery-round, I asked him casually how Madam was.

‘Fine, Mr Charlie. Full of beans.’

‘And soon,’ I murmured spitefully, ‘she’ll be full of Jerusalem artichokes too, heh heh! But, more to the point, where is my dinner, eh? Or rather, when , what?’

‘That was your dinner, Mr Charlie; Cookie wasn’t expecting Madam back today, was she?’ The saliva which had been so sweetly flooding my mouth instantly took on all the savour of a panther’s armpit. My face, I daresay, grew ashen. Jock was at my side in a twinkling, forcing one of his famous brandy-and-sodas into my nerveless fingers. (The secret of Jock’s famous b-and-s’s is that he makes them without soda: it is a simple skill, easily learnt.) I swallowed the prescription and pulled myself together.

‘Very well, Jock, tell me the worst. Have we to send out for fish and chips or, God forbid, to the Pizza Parlour?’

‘Well, I got a couple of gammon steaks …’

‘Hmph.’

‘And some of them French mushrooms what I can’t pronoun the name of and a few eggs …’

‘Yes? Go on.’

‘And I could sortie up some of them Reform potatoes, cooden I?’

‘I do not doubt that you could, but all these kickshaws sound more like a light luncheon than a nourishing dinner for a convalescent. Moreover, I am, as you know, eating for two; this moustache will soon contract beri-beri if it does not get its vitamins. Is there nothing to precede this niggardly repast?’

‘Yer what?’

‘Sorry, Jock. I mean, is there anything for starters?’